Posts by author
Kirstin Allio
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Primal Urges
Alexander Matthews interviews Colm Toíbín for Aerodrome, touching on Toíbín’s transition from journalism and poetry to fiction, coming out, therapy, expatriatism, and the fallacy of self-expression. Toíbín describes the writing process—and writing life—as a “basic urge to communicate levels of…
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Lucia Berlin Unplugged
When there’s emotional truth, there follows a rhythm, and I think a beauty of image, because you’re seeing clearly. In 1996 Lucia Berlin’s students Kellie Paluck and Adrian Zupp interviewed her for a class on poetics. Published now at Lit…
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Pregnant Words
In the New York Times, Rachel Cusk takes on two new memoirs about infertility and the quest for motherhood to explore the wholly compelling “half-analogy between the writing student and the woman embarking on in vitro fertilization.” Julia Leigh’s Avalanche relates six years of…
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Pulling the Strings of Coincidence
Coincidence often gives fiction its chance to mean something. Over at Lit Hub, in an excerpt from her new book The Kite and the String, Alice Mattison walks us through brilliantly executed coincidences in E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, Flannery O’Connor’s story…
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“A Return to the Pleasures of Critical Discourse”
“Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his hand, scrutinizing it for false messages, bad faith, and the occasional sign of progress,” writes Daphne Merkin, in The New York Times, of n+1 co-founder Mark Greif’s essay collection,…
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Structure as Lightning Rod
Writing for The Millions, M.C. Mah turns over all the cards in the deck on structure in storytelling. He gathers words of wisdom—and many metaphors—from luminaries like John McPhee, Borges, Vonnegut, and George Saunders, and then links the contemporary “horoscopic…
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What Poets and Writers Want
The staff at Poets & Writers put out a call to writers—“some of our most thoughtful and articulate citizens”—to share their perspectives on important issues for the next US president. Fifty writers weigh in, including Javier Zamora, Mira Ptacin, and Ocean…
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“A Hologram of Self”
Kristin Dombek’s The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism is just out from FSG, and over at n+1 she writes beguilingly, with humor and aplomb, about narcissists as hollow selves who become genius-tricksters at copying and…
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Many Roads to Worship
Erik Reece, author of Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea, writes a lively review of Thomas More’s 1516 novel, Utopia, for FSG’s Work in Progress. More’s Utopians “revere religious tolerance above all else…in keeping with the…
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Lovecraft’s Hometown
To know Lovecraft turns out to be a way to know a great deal about the city [of Providence]. Still weird, and mostly architecturally unchanged since the early 1900s, Providence was H.P. Lovecraft’s stomping ground and muse. Noel Rubinton takes…
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Violent Code
Poet Safiya Sinclair, author of Cannibal, takes part in the Kenyon Review Conversation series with insight into race in America from a Jamaican’s point of view. Living in a white academic bubble in Charlottesville, VA, immersing herself in slavery-era texts…
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The President’s Summer in Letters
Check out President Obama’s reading list for summer on the Vineyard, by Sarah Begley in TIME. Books mentioned include the memoirs H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, and William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Might the President be…